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Thoughts on art and money
the writer will do well to remember, if the struggle for bare existence has not already made it impossible to forget, Stevenson's comparison of the artist to the fille de joie, the obscure and draggled woman of the streets ; for he too is taking pay for his laughter, his com¬panionship, the gift of himself, nor can anything hide or change the elemental fact which is the material excuse for his trade—the fact that he lives by it. "An author," says Fielding at the beginning of Tom Jones, "ought to consider himself, not as a gentleman who gives a private or eleemosynary treat, but rather as one who keeps a public ordinary, at which all per¬sons are welcome for their money. . . . Men who pay for what they eat will insist on gratifying their pal¬ates, however nice and whimsical these may prove; and if everything is not agreeable to their taste, will challenge a right to censure, to abuse, and to damn their dinner without control." The best instincts in us may lament the fact: Mr. Howells says, in writing of "The Man of Letters as a Man of Busi¬ness," "I do not think any man ought to live by an art. . . . There is an instinctive sense of this, even in the midst of the grotesque confusion of our eco¬nomic being; people feel that there is something pro¬fane, something impious, in taking money for a pic¬ture, or a poem, or a statue. . . . The instinctive sense of the dishonour which money-purchase does to art is so strong that• sometimes a man of letters who can pay his way otherwise refuses pay for his work, as Lord Byron did, for a while, from a noble pride, and as Count Tolstoy tried to do, from a noble conscience." But even such personal independence only shifts the evil: "Byron's publisher profited by a generosity which did not reach his readers; and the Countess Tolstoy collects the copyright which her husband foregoes was published in 1902 ; so that these two eminent instances of protest against business in literature may be said not to have shaken its money basis." And even if writer, publisher, and public could all completely escape buying and selling, the writer would still have no hold upon his public ex¬cept by pleasing it. His appeal as an artist is de¬pendent on the arbitrary taste of a multitude, even if his living cease to be—so that if he can make up his mind to the greater limitation, it is hardly worth his while to boggle at the lesser. We need no Fielding, no Stevenson, no Howells come to tell us such things: they are matters of plain¬est hardest common sense. But they are too often forgotten. The argument has sometimes been used to justify giving the buying and reading public the poor¬est thing it can be brought to accept, instead of the best thing it, perhaps unconsciously, wants; but al¬most any argument can be prostituted to a low ex¬pediency. We say that the artist must serve, if he is to discharge his office at all : this is not to say that he ought to pander. If he choose to pander, we should let him; our safeguard against him is the public right to find him out in the long run and have no more of him ; it is not in the destruction of his right to be what he chooses. But in either event, whether he panders or truly serves, he has fully as much to gain expression_ Be must be true :o but :ha: :Itielity will avail him notning ai:v) true :o his audience, to his subject, and to the obscure priranpies of his appeal to thousands of intelligences as uri. his own as they are unlike each other. Let us see. if we can, what sme of the chief of these principles are, and how they operate: what kinds of provision the novelist must make for his audience that the mere dreamer of dreams takes no thought of.